11. Its astronomical purpose has been long-acknowledged
John Aubrey may have been off the mark with his Druid-temple theory, but one thing he got right was the link between Stonehenge and astronomy. Aubrey sketched out the arrangement of the stones, and from this he worked out that they were positioned so that the rising sun at Summer Solstice would appear directly in the middle of the two tallest stones in the circle. William Stukely later discovered that the sun rises in the direction of the Stonehenge Avenue at the Solstice. What an entrance you could make, strolling down the avenue at dawn on the solstice!
There’s another alignment, too. In 1997, Professor Gordon Freeman discovered that the sun at the Winter Solstice also rises directly between two other upright stones. There are two main theories about why Stonehenge was aligned in this way. Firstly, the alignment may have had something to do with sun worship. After all, the sun brings warmth and makes crops grow, making it an obvious object of primitive devotion. Secondly, it has been suggested that Stonehenge is an ancient astrological calendar, a way of telling the time of year by mapping the position of the sun in relation to the monoliths.
